Posts Tagged ‘The Farm 51’

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Alec wasn’t entirely happy when we duct-taped him to a chair, bolted his Rift goggs to his skull and jacked him into a tour of Chernobyl and Pripyat with Chernobyl VR Project [official site]. He liked seeing inside that irradiated corner of Ukraine – known to Those Young People as the setting for the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games – but technically it’s messy. It’s split between photogrammetry-scanned environments and plain old 360-degree video, see, coming out a bit disjointed. Well! Today brings the release of a Vive edition, along with an update adding more content and improving those videos.

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Back in the days of STALKER and its two sequels, I felt like I was the only games hack who didn’t get sent on a tour of Chernobyl and Pripyat. Those who did visit came back with reports of rain and health worries and mystery meats, then shared photographs of them smiling in front of a decaying Ferris wheel or looking sombre in a Marie Celeste classroom. Perhaps it is best that I never went myself. What a strange thing to be a tourist to. Is any possible response appropriate?

The Chernobyl VR Project, essentially finished but for the time being only available for Oculus Rift, with a more refined version due for both that and Vive a little later, gives me my chance to be a tourist, without the background anxiety about background radiation.Read the rest of this entry »

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Get Even (link to Facebook page) is an upcoming FPS from some of the folks behind Painkiller, whose new studio created NecroVision and Deadfall Adventures. If you were to watch the trailer, you’d probably be able to guess that the men in camouflage clobber have been shooting one another but other than that, the game could be about anything. Examining the textures of dilapidated buildings, perhaps, or hunting for kidnapped torture victims in the dark. It’s a shame that the video is a pile of bobbins because the game has a couple of interesting ideas. The developers are claiming that ‘large-scale real-world’ scanning allows the creation of photorealistic graphics and I’m not sure if that means I didn’t just watch a live action trailer. What do you reckon?

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Would you like to see a cinematic trailer for Deadfall Adventures? The voiceover spouts a lot of vaguely mystical gubbins about the end of all things, from men to mountains, but then decides against that philosophy by adding that everything is actually just asleep. That’s as good an excuse as I’ve ever heard for the introduction of a reanimated, fire-eyed mummy and that’s precisely the sort of blighter that James Quatermain will be up against as he raids tombs and punches mythology in the face. The trailer may not tell us much but it did serve to remind me that the game exists, following a delay earlier this year. And there’s a speedy time lapse of a withering corpse!

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I do love it when a press release attempts to sell a slip as a piece of news. Deadfall Adventures’ release date was so very much set for July 30th that its own website still hasn’t shaken the belief. Today it announces it’s “confirmed for September 27th release”. Phew, confirmed! Anyway, that peculiarly needless griping aside, the real news is that they’ve announced a co-op mode for the third-person actioner.

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If Uncharted were a first-person shooter, with all of its traps, tombs and mythical Nazi magnets intact, it would probably look quite a lot like Deadfall Adventures. The announcement trailer for the game, which was previously announced under a different name, doesn’t show a great deal of action, opting instead for a predictable but slightly confused voiceover, but when the shooting hits the fan in the last few seconds, the development team’s history is more apparent than the pseudo-history they are exploring. Fiery demons are the order of the day, and lots of them too. The Farm 51 is a team founded by former Painkiller developers, who returned to their original hell recently and, before that, planted some more hell in the hell of World War I with NecroVisioN. The trailer is entombed below.

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The latest incarnation of Painkiller attempts to avoid the possibility of being weaker than the original game by being the original game, plus its first expansion, all spruced up and ready to party like it’s 2004. A sprucier 2004. But is it a competent copy or something else? I’ve gathered a saucerful of souls and a headful of thoughts. Here they are.